Setting up e-commerce capabilities for your Open edX course

The ability to sell courses or verified certificates is extremely important for many delivering Open edX courses. Thankfully, configuring courses to require payment for a seat or a certificate is a simple process that this article will show you how to do in a few simple steps. First, however, your organization must be set up with the capability to use e-commerce features. This process is generally something we do for our customers, as it can get a little technical. Once your organization is set up, just follow these steps.

Navigate to the e-commerce dashboard for your organization.

This will probably be something like http://ecommerce.edxdemo.appsembler.com/courses (which is what I'm using on this example). In order to access this page, you will need to have an admin or superuser account. This way, not just any course author or instructor can make changes to settings.

Click Add New Course

Fill out the necessary information

You Course ID is the part of the course URL that includes organization, course number, and course run. It typically begins with "course-v1:"

Choose your course type

There are 4 course types for you to choose from.

Free (Audit) - Allows students to take the course for free with no certificate. This is probably not the type you would choose if you're setting up e-commerce on the course.

Verified - Allows the students to purchase a Verified Certificate. Typically, students can begin the course for free and choose at a later time (deadline to be determined by you) if they want to pay a fee for the certificate.

Professional Education - A paid certificate track that requires students to pay before they can secure a seat in the course.

Credit - Offers a third track option. Students can audit a course for free, choose to upgrade and purchase a verified certificate, or choose to pay for institutional credit at a higher education organization.

Select the price for your course, whether or not you will be requiring ID verification, and deadlines.

Click "Create Course" at the bottom of the page. And you will now see a confirmation message like this.

From the student side...

Have students navigate to the course info page

Students will click the enroll button and be directed to a page asking for payment.

Students will then choose how they would like to pay.

We're going to use PayPal for this example.

If using PayPal, students are asked to sign in and confirm their purchase.

Students are then redirected back to Open edX and given the choice of verifying ID now or later.

If the student selects "later," they are taken to their course dashboard where they will find their newly purchased course.